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Jim Baker: The Full Transcript

Susan B. Glasser is POLITICO’s chief international affairs columnist. Her new podcast, The Global Politico, comes out Mondays. Subscribe here. Follow her on Twitter @sbg1.

For the first episode of Politico Magazine's Susan B. Glasser's new podcast, The Global Politico, she sat down with Secretary Jim Baker, White House chief of staff and treasury secretary under President Ronald Reagan and secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush. A transcript of Glasser and Baker's conversation, and the podcast, follows:

Glasser: I’m delighted to have Secretary Jim Baker joining us as our very first podcast interview for the Global POLITICO. And there really isn’t anyone else who is a better choice to be the first Global POLITICO than Secretary Jim Baker. He is an incredible rarity in modern American politics because he’s somebody who has straddled both politics. He ran five presidential campaigns and, basically, if you ran for president anytime between Watergate and the end of the Cold War, you had something to do with Jim Baker.

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He also had an extraordinary run as a policy leader and entrepreneur, secretary of treasury and secretary of state during the period—perhaps the most consequential period in modern American foreign relations, the breakup of the Soviet Union and really the end of the Cold War and navigating into a new world. A moment that may or may not now be coming to an end, which is certainly something we’ll discuss in this inaugural conversation.

As I explained to Secretary Baker, our goal is not just to have the headlines. Not just to talk about the day’s news. But really to, wherever possible, talk with people who have been in the room and who have experienced what it’s like to have to make deals, have to make policy firsthand in some way, and to also get behind the scenes with who are some of these global actors. And that might be a good way for us to start. When I remember very vividly speaking to a friend of mine who spent a lot of time in the White House over the past few years and I said, “Well, what did you learn about working in the White House?”

And he said, “No matter how much you think about it beforehand or talk about it or study it, the thing that you learn in the White House is that who is there really matters. And that people really matter.” And Jim Baker really mattered when he was the White House chief of staff. So we’re going to start with that. I promise not too many newsmaker headlines but we’ve got to talk about the Trump administration and its start.

Your mantra, “Prior preparation prevents poor performance.” I’ve been thinking about that an awful lot these last couple of weeks. What do you think?

Baker: The point you make is absolutely accurate that people are policy. And so, when you look at a White House, you definitely have to look at the major players. I do firmly believe that preparation prevents poor performance. I think, for instance, that the rollout of this recent temporary ban on travel from seven, think, countries that do have a sad record with respect to terrorism. At least not so much over here, but over there—could have been done better.

The process is really important in the White House. How you roll out policies can oftentimes be every bit as important as what the policy itself is. And the rollout here was deficient. I think we have to acknowledge that. The president’s own Cabinet officers were not fully briefed in advance. They weren’t consulted in too much detail, if at all. And the Congress was never consulted. You’ll find if you spend much time in a White House, that the way we judge our presidents is on the basis of how many of their policies they can implement, turn into law, and the way you normally do that is with the aid and assistance of the other co-equal branch of government, the Congress.

And if you want the Congress to be in on the landing of a policy, they’ve got to be in on the takeoff. And there was, I think, sort of a lack of preparation or consultation here. There’s nothing wrong with a president implementing a controversial policy to fulfill a campaign obligation. And in fact, there’s something good about that in terms of setting a standard or letting people know this is a president who is going to keep his promises and keep his commitments. But the way you do it is so very, very important when you get up there in Washington.

So, this has become very controversial far beyond, I think, the significance of the policy itself. It’s a temporary ban. It’s a ban on seven countries. You can argue that other countries should have been included, and you can argue that the policy itself is not going to help us combat terrorism. In fact, it could conceivably work the other way. But it’s pretty hard to sustain an argument that they shouldn’t have checked to make sure that the green card issue was handled properly and things like that, and that Congress was consulted.

So there’s nothing wrong with implementing or with carrying out your campaign promises. But the way you do it when you get to Washington and when you get to the White House is extraordinarily important.

Glasser: Mike Rogers, who actually worked with the Trump team on the national security transition until he was booted off with the rest of the initial group, said last night—and I was really struck by this—“It was like watching an octopus put its sock on in the morning.” [Laughter] Now, you are friends with Rex Tillerson. We can talk a little bit more about that, but I was struck by the fact that he and the other Cabinet officers seem to be kind of out of the loop so early on.

Not just on the executive order, but clearly on a number of key decisions. There was a decision by Trump and his team of insiders to do a lot of things that would make the secretary of state job and those of other secretaries—the secretary of defense [phonetic]—a lot harder.

Baker: That was, I think, one of the problems with the rollout. One of the major problems is the agencies that will be required to implement the order were not fully consulted, I don’t think. And you have to do that. But look, this is a brand new White House. They’ve got to get the kinks out. Every new White House has some problems. I’m sure we had some when we were there. Plenty of them.

So it’s not unexpected that you’re going to have this kind of kinks. The important thing is that you learn from them and correct them. And the next time there is a major policy announcement to put out, make sure you do your consultation. And that includes, certainly, your administration and the officers who are obligated to carry out the policy but also, the Congress. And to some extent, make sure you have a communications strategy that supports it.

As I understand it, there were not a lot of there was no pre-release of a paper that said, “Here’s what we’re going to do, and here’s why we’re doing it, and here is what it will do.” But you have to have that.

Glasser: Well, that’s what’s so striking and a lot of people have been bandying about Ronald Reagan as another example of an outsider president and a team that came to Washington with a sharp ideological course correction. But it was no surprise and full disclosure here. My husband and I are working on a book about you, Secretary Baker, and so we’ve been spending a fair amount of time looking back on the Reagan administration.

But no student, I think, of the Reagan administration would compare him with Trump, either, on the basis of personality, which is very different. And I’m struck by the fact that even when it comes to putting together an administration, the choices were different. But people must have been making this comparison for you. What do you buy? Would Ronald Reagan have signed this order? Would he have rolled this out like this?

Baker: I think Ronald Reagan would have taken action in the first few days of his presidency to carry out his campaign promises. There’s no doubt about that. Although, we did come in with the idea that we were going to focus with laser-like intensity on fixing the economy. We inherited a really bad economy and we did that and we did that at the expense even of considering some foreign policy issues.

But Ronald Reagan’s administration had a lot of people in it, myself included, who had been there before. And we sort of knew how Washington works and we what worked and what didn’t. And consultation and not surprising people is important if you want them to support the policies. And Ronald Reagan was very good at understanding and he was ideological. No doubt about it. He held certain views very viscerally. A smaller government, freedom of the individual, lower taxes, strong defense. And he stuck with those principles pretty well. But in terms of how you got there and what you did, he wanted to do it in a way that made it work and so that you could accomplish it. And that’s what he did.

Glasser: Yeah, never heard the phrase—sort of this idea of being crazy and unpredictable as being built into how he thought about his role as a disruptor.

Baker: He was to some extent, an ideologue, but people don’t appreciate the significant extent to which he was really very pragmatic. If he told me once, he told me 1,000 times sitting there in the Oval Office with him when we had to decide what to do about a bill that’s pending on the Hill when we’ve got some pushback here or there from Congress, whether we would tweak it.

Here and there change it a little, and would say, “Jim, I’d rather get 80% of what I want them to go over the cliff with my flag flying.” He said it over and over and over. So he was quite a pragmatic about that. I, for one—and I don’t know President Trump very well—but, I, for one, think he’s going to be a pragmatic president. Why do I say that? Well, I say that because he’s a businessman who has had some success. He’s had some problems as well, but he’s had some significant success in business. And I think he wants to succeed.

So I think he’s going to be pragmatic. But time will tell. We don’t know yet. The White House that they have constructed has a lot of chiefs. [LAUGHTER] And the lines of authority and responsibility are, perhaps, not too well-defined at this stage. And there’s nothing unusual about that. We had several power centers in our White House and there were some tensions as a result of that.

But it worked well for the Gipper because he got all different views and then he was in the position to say, “OK, here’s what I’m going to do.” But he also made sure that it worked. In this White House, it seems to me you’ve got at least four, maybe five different power centers, so we’re just going to have to wait and see how it works in practice.

Running a business and running the government are two entirely different functions, quite frankly, and process matters.

Glasser: That’s a really important point to pick back up on, which is what you had that’s different than this White House, right, is process that worked and that was part of the discipline and the skill that you, in particular, brought to the White House, and I think it’s probably the reason Democratic presidents as well as Republicans presidents, have been interested in your views on how to run the White House.

Trump, both so far in the White House, but also in his business career. If you look at how he seems to have run his businesses, he’s never really been a manager of a large operation or surrounded himself with professionals.

Baker: That’s correct, but running a business and running the government are two entirely different functions, quite frankly, and process matters. Process matters a lot in order to avoid mistakes, controversy. As I understand it, there was a little bit of a debate internally about whether green cards should be included in this order or not and it was resolved ultimately that they would be. But then they had to turn around and walk that back within 24 hours.

Glasser: So actually, this is a great pivot point, too. You talked about sort of how business is different than government. And it’s different than politics too. Rex Tillerson, incoming secretary of state, comes, obviously from an entire career in business at ExxonMobil here. Fareed Zakaria characterized you as a key conduit in vouching for him with the Trump people.

Tell us about him as a person but also, what advice you gave him in making that leap from business to politics.

Baker: Well, I had one fairly long conversation with him and I had conversations with the important players in the transition about him, and I’ve always been very high on Rex Tillerson. Not just because he’s a Texan, but because he has managed one of the largest companies in the world and done so very successfully. So my sense is that he has the management qualifications and the negotiating qualifications. He’s represented ExxonMobil in negotiating some really big agreements with sovereign nations.

And so, I think he has the qualities that are very, very important … and that are needed in a secretary of state. What I’ve said many times before—that the most important thing for a secretary of state to have is a seamless relationship with his president. And that’s one of the things I told Rex. I think he understands that. But it’s really important because the president is Numero Uno in the formulation and implementation of the nation’s foreign policy.

The secretary of state, by statute, is supposed to be his primary adviser and implementer, and I was really lucky. I had a president who had been a friend for 40 years. He was my daughter’s godfather. I had run every one of his campaigns. Nobody was going to ever get between me and my president. So when I went out and said something, even if it was wrong, people thought, at least, that I was speaking for the president, and in most cases, knew I was.

And I had a president who would support me and protect me and defend me even when I was wrong. So it was an extraordinary help to me in serving as secretary of state. You need—everybody in Washington wants their piece of the foreign policy turf.

Glasser: Including Steve Bannon now, who has been written into the Principals Committee.

Baker: And including for sure, White House aides. It’s always been that way and so having a president who says, “Now, my guy on foreign policy is going to be secretary of state.” That’s really, really important. That’s what the statute contemplates. That’s what the laws contemplate. That’s not to say that there are not going to be a lot of other players in foreign policy. Coordinating between them, that’s the role of the national security adviser. But the national security adviser should not seek to usurp the role of the secretary of state. So you have these conflicts, a lot of times, between the secretary of state, secretary of defense, national security adviser.

I tell people that the model for constructing your national security apparatus for incoming presidents should be the George H.W. Bush [model] because he knew foreign policy. He knew how it was supposed to work and he saw to it that it did work that way. And he put a bunch of us who had been friends before, who had served in different iterations in prior administrations on his foreign policy team and we worked. It worked. We had very few of the back fighting and conflict issues that many national security teams have.

Glasser: You’re describing something that’s almost exactly opposite of what we seem to know about how Trump has set up this administration.

Baker: Well, we don’t know that yet. The secretary of state hasn’t even been confirmed, thanks to significant political opposition from the opposite party who can’t block him and won’t block him. He’s extraordinarily well-qualified. But they’re slow-walking it. That’s wrong. That’s wrong for the country. So we don’t know yet. But here’s the deal: Presidents are going to rely on people they trust for their adviser.

I don’t care where the president comes from, or where his advisers come from. And in many instances, the people they rely on are people who have gone through the fire with them in the campaign. So it’s not unusual to have your chief campaign strategist participate in meetings of the National Security Council.

I was Reagan’s White House chief of staff. My portfolio was politics. And yet, I attended every National Security Council meeting in the Reagan administration. Now, I was not named a principle, but when I went to the Treasury Department, which historically, is not a principal. Reagan named me a principal of the National Security Council. So I see some precedent for this, and people should not be surprised that a president is going to rely for advice on people who have earned their confidence, like the people who brought them through the campaign.

Glasser: Well, I think that’s part of the danger of a moment like this: Clearly, some precedents are being exploded and trying to figure out in the midst of almost the fog of so many things happening at once what’s really significant.

Baker: But I don’t think it is a precedent that’s being exploded.

Glasser: Tell me about Rex Tillerson. First of all, you’re hunting friends, right? And of course, with you, that’s the most important.

But we cannot be the policemen for the world. You cannot practice foreign policy according to the principles of Mother Teresa.

Baker: Well, we have hunted together. I think on occasion, maybe quail, but we’ve certainly hunted elk together up at Ray Hunt’s ranch in Utah and …

Glasser: Is he as avid a hunter as you are?

Baker: Well, Rex is—yeah, he’s a Texan. He’s a pretty damn good hunter. And he enjoys it. But Rex, I’ve known Rex outside of just hunting. He, after all, has been the head of ExxonMobil. I live in Houston, the energy capital of the United States.

Glasser: So you don’t share worries about his relationship with Putin or other authoritarian leaders around the world?

Baker: No, I don’t have any qualms whatsoever about the fact that Rex Tillerson knows Vladimir Putin. I know Vladimir Putin too, and I worked with him. But by the way, people forget this: For 15 years after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, we worked very productively with Yeltsin and Putin and they cooperated with the West for a long time until, I think, Putin got in trouble domestically in Russia and needed a whipping boy to point to and so NATO and the United States have provided that whipping boy.

What Rex should have done was become familiar and friendly, if he could, with Vladimir Putin when he was seeking concessions for drilling rights and things in that great big country of Russia for ExxonMobil. And he was looking at what he should have been looking at, which was improving the bottom line results for the shareholders of ExxonMobil. He’s going to be wearing an entirely different hat now, and I don’t have the slightest worry about whether he’s going to be acting in the best interests of the United States of America. He’s a patriot and he will.

Glasser: Does he have a foreign policy orientation?

Baker: I don’t know whether he has foreign policy orientation or not. I’ve never talked with him at great length about that, but I will say this: I think he’s a pragmatist. I think he’s a realist. You saw his confirmation hearing. My own view—and I consider myself a realist who understands the importance of principles and values in formulating and implementing our foreign policy. You have to base it on the principles and values that made America great.

But we cannot be the policemen for the world. You cannot practice foreign policy according to the principles of Mother Teresa. It’s too bad that you can’t, but you can’t. Because when the body bags start coming home, if you don’t have a significant national interest at stake, you’re going to lose the policy. Vietnam is an example. Iraq 2003 is an example. You have to have a significant national interest at stake to maintain the policy.

Glasser: Well, this is a good pivot point, right, to President Trump and his view of the world. I think we’re all still a little confused about that. My friend, Leon Wieseltier, the other day said to me, “Well, Trump is a muscular isolationist,” which is to say he talks in a muscular form about using American might, but doesn’t seem to, when it comes down to it, focus on anything other than withdrawing [phonetic].

Baker: Well, he’s also said we’ve gotten into too many wars we shouldn’t have gotten into. So, we need to wait and see where he comes down when he’s confronted with discrete issues that will require him to make a decision one way or another. Every issue that reaches the president’s desk in the White House is a close call. It’s a tough issue. It’s tough. There are arguments on both sides. That’s why having a really thorough process is so important.

Glasser: But see, every time you say that, I think it gets me and probably others a little bit nervous because what we know of Trump suggests—it’s not like some process is going to magically appear after 70 years.

Baker: Well, we don’t quite know that yet, do we? So I don’t know that you can assume that, and let me say that nothing concentrates a mind like being out of power. And if you take a few hits and a few losses as you go along, sometimes you tend to change your behavior. And so how do we know? We don’t know yet. I think he’s—you said an isolationist, a muscular isolationist. I hope he’s not an isolationist.

And being muscular in terms of building up our defenses again the way Ronald Reagan did is good. I think he’s, to some extent, an economic nationalist. And I’m not close to him at all. But based on the positions he’s taken and the things he said in the campaign, it seems to me he’s an economic nationalist. I just hope that he will understand and appreciate the importance of America being involved in the world.

Because when we’re involved, we’re a force for stability. Everybody knows we’re not out there to take their—to mess up their sandbox, take any of their territories. We’re a force for good. And being involved and engaged doesn’t mean necessarily that you send in the 82nd Airborne. There are plenty of ways that we can be involved and engaged without doing that. But American leadership, in my view, is very, very important.

Glasser: You’ve spoken with President Trump. Is it more than just the one time in person?

I said, “You know, I was an establishment Republican back there when Reagan was coming up and we were really fearful.” We were afraid he was going to get us into a nuclear war. Here was this grade-B movie actor, Bedtime for Bonzo.

Baker: I had one telephone conversation with him early on and I met with him at his request in May right after he had locked up the nomination. That meeting came about as a consequence of a lunch that I had at the Reagan Library after I gave a eulogy at Nancy Reagan’s funeral. And we went to a little holding room for lunch and there in that lunch were George and Charlotte Shultz, Newt and Callista Gingrich, Brian and Mila Mulroney. Brian, the former prime minister of Canada.

We were talking about politics and the upcoming election, and I said that I saw some parallels here to the way that Reagan came up. Not talking about personalities of the two people, but the way Trump was coming up, and I said, “You know, I was an establishment Republican back there when Reagan was coming up and we were really fearful.” We were afraid he was going to get us into a nuclear war. Here was this grade-B movie actor, Bedtime for Bonzo.

My God, the world was going to end and that turned out not to be the case. He turned out to be extraordinarily pragmatic and he understood the importance of getting things done right to move the country forward. But I said in that meeting, at that lunch, I said, “I think that he has—Trump has the potential to bring back the Reagan Democrats over to the Republican side.” And I think that Brian Mulroney, unbeknownst to me, he was a friend of Trump’s in Palm Beach and … I think he told Trump that. And Trump called and said, “I’d like to meet with you.” And I said, “Fine. I’d be delighted to meet with you.” And we met. And I ended up giving him a two-page paper—just two pages.

My thoughts on the general election and some discrete foreign policy issues. Like, I, for instance, said, “You know, I would hope that you not be against every trade deal but want to make better trade deals. I would hope that you would not want to get rid of NATO, which had been an extraordinary successful alliance in terms of U.S. interests as far as I was concerned, but improve it and make sure that our allies pay their fair share. I would hope that you would stop talking about negotiating down American debt obligations in order to save a few bucks,” I said, “because the full faith and credit of the United States is extremely important.”

On some of these issues, I think he has moved a little bit in that direction, which is very good, in my view.

Glasser: Well, let’s take a quick tour of the world as he encounters it. The global part of the Global POLITICO. Three areas, in particular, stand out early on where Trump has signaled a shift and even a dramatic shift in American policy. One of those is Israel, where I just spent a little bit of time and you have made a point pretty consistently of always being critical in a way of the settlements as an obstacle to peacemaking.

Baker: Hey, not just me ...

Glasser: No, of course not. That’s been consistent with American politics.

Baker: Every American administration since ‘67.

Glasser: Right, until this one. So he …

Baker: Until this one.

Glasser: Right, that’s right. So they look like they’re going to make a big break. What do you think the effect of that is going to be on the prospects for peace?

Baker: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what the effect is going to be, but I did take note in the campaign where President Trump said he wanted to be the president who solved the Arab-Israeli dispute. That would be really great. That would be big-time. If he could get that done, it would be huge.

Glasser: How is he going to do that while enabling the Israeli—

Baker: But, but. You can’t get that done if you are in effect going to act as Israel’s lawyer. You have to be seen to be a semi-honest broker if you expect to bring the two sides together. Read the “Art of the Deal” — that’s how you get things done. And you have to understand the positions on both sides and bring the two sides together if you’re going to be a mediator. I don’t know any other way. Now, with respect to settlements particularly, the reason every administration, Republican or Democrat, has opposed settlements since 1967—since the beginning of Israel—is because that forecloses the possibility of negotiating a peace on a basis for land for peace.

Because you’re creating facts on the ground that prevent that from happening. And in effect, if you don’t have that U.N. Resolution 242 and 338 approach, land for peace, then I don’t know how you get there. I don’t know how you get there unless you want to get rid of the two-state solution and you have a unitary state, which will, in my view, present Israel with a lot of difficult choices.

A choice, for instance, of whether she’s going to remain a democratic state and a Jewish state or have to give up one or the other. Because the demographics, if you go to a one-state solution, the demographics of Arab population versus Jewish population, will overwhelm Israel. So I think the two-state solution is very much in the interest of Israel and the future of Israel. That’s what every American leader has thought for a long, long time. Now, that may be changing.

That’s certainly changing as far as, I think, the view of the current Israeli government is concerned. But we don’t know yet, do we?

Glasser: No, we don’t know yet.

Baker: So we haven’t seen the Embassy move yet, have we? So we don’t know. It may happen. If that happens, it’s going to make it a heck of a lot harder to even think about negotiating a peace deal, not to mention what the fallout will be in other countries in the region that would be opposed to that type of a move.

Glasser: One of the things that was so striking in this period from November 9 through the inauguration was the fact that Trump and his team seemed willing to jump into foreign policy and engage. In particular, with the Israeli leadership under Prime Minister Netanyahu and I was thinking back to that transition between Carter and Reagan after the 1980 election and we’ve long had this tradition that there’s only one president at a time. But I just wondered what you made of Trump openly sort of dealing with Netanyahu, with the Egyptians. Apparently, on this issue of trying to block this U.N.

Baker: Well, I can’t point to an instance in which it has happened before. But there’s nothing completely sacrosanct about the idea we just have one president and we still just have one president. But the president-elect obviously is the future power. And it’s understandable that countries would want to get acquainted and get close to that president-elect and there’s nothing in the law or in foreign policy, I don’t think, that keeps any president-elect from participating if that’s what he decides to do.

Most of them have decided not to. Interesting you mentioned the Carter-Reagan transition because in the meeting we had with President Carter, after we won that election, he only asked President Reagan to please support him on one thing, and that was AWACS for Saudi Arabia.

AWACS aircraft as a buffer against Iran is what it was. But Israel, of course, opposed it very vigorously and when we started trying to implement that policy, we had 77 U.S. senators on a letter saying, “Don’t sell AWACS to Saudi Arabia.” We ended up getting it done because of President Reagan, but President-elect Reagan told President Carter, “Yes, I’ll support you.”

Glasser: That’s so interesting. So on our quick tour of the world—you’re here in Texas. Do we really need a wall with Mexico?

Baker: No, I don’t know. I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable about how much it would cut off. It was a campaign promise and a big one. I think it’s OK for sure to have one. I think we do, at the very least, need to find a way to control our borders. Can you do it with a virtual wall to some extent? I would think so and maybe that’s what the president meant when he said, ’We’re going to have a wall.’ Some of it could be virtual. But there’s nothing wrong with a country wanting to control its borders. That’s a No. 1 factor of sovereignty. So I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The idea that we were going to end up deporting all illegals up here is something that’s different. That’s very difficult to see ever being implemented.

Glasser: Well, and then you have this question of we’ve had a very close relationship. We’ve been lucky. Blessed by geography, right? With our two oceans but also more or less, with our two neighbors with Canada and Mexico. Traditionally, those have been the bedrock relationships.

Obviously, that relationship is not on visiting terms.

Baker: No, no it’s not, and that’s disturbing. … And particularly, disturbing, I think, is the fact that it had to do not with building the wall, but with who was going to pay for it. And that seems to me to be a sidebar issue. Now, that was a campaign promise, so it’s understandable the president would want to try to find a way to fulfill it. But again, if you expect to be able to make agreement—again, the art of a deal is understanding what the political constraints are on the person across the table. So I was glad to see after the initial head-butting that the two presidents spoke to each other by phone and they’re going to talk some more and get together. That’s a really important relationship for the United States and we shouldn’t lose it. We also ought to be very careful not to get ourselves into a tit-for-tat trade war. And I think the president understands that. I mean, I think he understands the dangers to the United States in a trade war.

Glasser: Well, it’s interesting. I think there was a headline in The New York Times the other day that said, “The trade war with China is already beginning.” Do you—

Baker: Well, I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with pushing back on trade. We supported China’s entry into the [World Trade Organization] and I’m not sure that they had totally fulfilled all of the obligations of membership in the WTO. There are still some non-tariff trade barriers and all of that.

I’ve never been one who thinks that currency manipulation ought to be a part of the trade agreement. I think once we get into that, that’s sort of a—of course, that may be because I was a treasury secretary. But once you get into that swamp, who is to say that our overly accommodating military policy in the United States is not currency manipulation? So you get into all that. But I think that we need to figure out how to approach China and how to build a Trump administration relationship with China and that it ought to be looked at strategically and as an entire relationship, and not just one issue. And I’d discreetly take one issue after another. You’re never going to get anywhere if you do that.

Glasser: The Republican Party, as long as you have been in it, free trade has been one of its bulwarks.

Baker: Free trade has been a mantra of the Republican Party, particularly the right side of the Republican Party and the left side of the Democratic Party, for many, many years. And why? Because free trade creates economic growth and economic growth creates jobs. Are there segments that are adversely affected? You bet. And our manufacturing segment in the United States has been adversely affected by some of the free trade deals. The people who support free trade will say, “Ah-ha. But we generated far more economic growth overall and that created a lot of jobs.”

And there’s some truth to that. But the reason Donald Trump is president of the United States today is because he appealed to the disaffected blue-collar workers in our manufacturing sector. And those are the people that voted for him.

Glasser: Are you surprised at how quickly, though, some of your Republican colleagues seem willing to let go of their longstanding views?

Baker: Well, I don’t know that they’ve let go of it. They have to—particularly if they’re in the Legislature, in Congress, they’ve got to live with the administration, with the executive branch. And you now have a Republican president who doesn’t believe all of those things. And so I’m not surprised.

Glasser: All right, so Russia. It’s been 25 years this year since the collapse of the Soviet Union. You were secretary of state. You managed what, by everybody’s account, was a much softer landing for such a cataclysmic event. Many people believed that some of the disruptions that we’re feeling now in the world is almost a delayed consequence of the end of that 70-year confrontation with the Soviet Union and that now, you see these Cold War institutions perhaps finally coming to an end. Or was their goal like NATO? What do you say to people like that? I’ve never in my life had as many conversations as I have in the past few months about the liberal international order. Whether it’s finally seen its day.

Baker: Liberalized trade and investment. Well, again, I think you’re going to have to wait and see. I just said a minute ago, I would hope that the president and his administration would understand the importance of U.S. engagement abroad.

The United States has always supported a regime of liberalized trade and investment. Yeah, it’s got to be fair trade. Yes, we’ve been screwed around with to some extent by some countries. And yes, that ought to be correct but we ought not to totally retreat from the world, in my view, and become isolationists or let’s say overly protectionist. But we ought to fight for our rights and make sure that the trade is fair trade. Where there are non-tariff barriers in places—I mean, it’s better to open foreign markets than it is to close our own. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use that as a lever, the threat of closing our own.

Glasser: OK, Russia. Would you lift the sanctions?

Baker: No, I would not lift the sanctions. I don’t see how you can possibly excuse the behavior. If you don’t like what’s going on in the country next door to you, you roll the tax. Well, that’s not acceptable, so I think the sanctions were justified and important, and I wouldn’t lift them. Let’s see what happens. Are we going to get anything for it? Are we going to get anything for moving the Embassy to Jerusalem or are we just going to do it?

I mean, you know, you have all of those—again, I go back, “Art of the Deal”.

I think our foreign policy over the past eight years has not succeeded, to put it charitably.

Glasser: Well, exactly. There’s nothing I’ve seen as we’ve been working on this book, there’s nothing that animates you more than both making a deal, but in particular, seeing the possibility of an opening. Trump has a catchy book title, the “Art of the Deal”. But in his rhetoric, in his positioning in the world, he strikes me as a much more zero-sum person than you are. But let’s put your “Art of the Deal” hat on as Jim Baker. As you look around the world today, where are these possibilities? Where are there holes for smart quarterbacks to throw the ball?

Baker: Well, I think the world is in much worse shape than it was eight years ago. I think our foreign policy over the past eight years has not succeeded, to put it charitably. So there could be some very big opportunities out there. There are definitely going to be some very big challenges out there. I don’t know at this stage of the game with an administration only 10 days old where exactly those are going to be. But I hope that the administration is alert enough, engaged enough to take advantage of them.

And to look at the big picture. But every action has a counter reaction and for instance, if you talk about what Russia is doing in the Ukraine. I can’t believe that this administration and the people that have been appointed to the important national security positions will acquiesce in or support the idea of just rolling the tanks. We have allies now in Europe that are scared to death. All of the Baltic states and the Eastern European states that have joined NATO.

The first job I had when I became secretary of state was to fulfill George H.W. Bush’s promise to travel to every NATO capital and re-strengthen that alliance. That’s what we ought to do if we want to deal from a position of strength with Russia. At the same time you do that, you can say now, “You guys are going to have to pay the fair share. You need to pay your 2 percent of GDP for the fence or then we’re going to think about changing NATO.” That would be a way to go about that, I think.

Glasser: You must be getting a lot of phone calls and messages from your friends around the world, though, wondering what on Earth is going on in America.

Baker: Not as many as I got when I was down in Florida running the recount for George W. Bush when they were calling me from all over saying, “Don’t you Americans know how to conduct an election? What’s going on in your country?” And I would say, “Well, let me tell you something, Prime Minister.” They were people I had dealt with.

I said, “What’s going on here is that we’re dealing with an extraordinarily emotional, intense problem and we’re dealing with it within the rule of law and the rule of law is going to prevail. And I dare say if you had this situation in your country, you might see tanks in the streets and we don’t see them here.” And that was my answer. Am I getting some? I’m getting a few but not a lot.

Glasser: And what do you tell them?

Baker: I tell them exactly what I’ve been telling you. We don’t know yet. I think we have a president who wants to succeed. We’re going to find out soon enough and I’ve told you what I thought about the Mexican deal. What difference does it pay [phonetic]? Yes, we ought to build a wall to protect our—we ought to secure our borders. But who pays for it is in the big picture, not all that great, in my view.

And you can’t expect to have Mexico say, “Yeah, well, we’re going to pay for the wall.” They’ll never do that. And now, we have the risks down there that the left-wing candidate for president, this guy—Obrador could win. That would be very bad for the United States because all Mexicans oppose the idea of being arm-twisted into paying for the wall. They’re not going to do it. Now, we can find ways to extract 2 billion bucks or whatever. We can get that money. Somebody came up with a great idea the other day.

I was in Washington last weekend and having a drink at the Hay-Adams bar and somebody said, “What we ought to do is take it out of the drug money that we’ve collected from Mexican drug dealers and just use that to pay for the wall.” That’s something maybe Mexico could tolerate. I don’t know. [laughter] We’ll see.